katie_greenwinginmymouth's reviews
565 reviews

Ghost Season assembles a cast of five main characters whose interaction tells the story of life in a contested town on the border between north and south Sudan - Alex a naive, white American NGO employee working on mapping the area; William a Nilot local working for him as a translator; Layla a nomad local working at the NGO compound as a cook; Mustafa a young nomad boy working at the compound doing odd jobs; and Dena a diasporic Sudanese-American woman staying at the compound making a film.

 

The first half of this book was great - the way Dena’s filmaking and Alex’s mapmaking are used as metaphors for the ways in which both see and are seen by the local community was really well done. Dena’s position as filmmaker illuminates and illustrates her unease as a diasporic returnee to her parents’ country, wanting to blend in but inevitably sticking out. Alex sees his mapping as important, valuable and useful work and dismisses Dena’s work as just art with less practical application. He attracts attention in the village as a white person, frequently disrupting Dena’s attempts to blend in and film everyone. But Dena herself is a curiosity too - a woman who dresses like a man and carries a camera, her gender is a mystery to many. Alex of course tries it on with her completely oblivious to the fact that she’s queer and not at all interested in him which only serves to worsen their relationship.

 

What Alex doesn’t bank on is how difficult it proves to map contested land. The landscape is constantly changing both due to climate change and conflict, the traditional patterns of nomad communities disrupted by shrinking water sources and disappearing grazing lands. Even before climate change the rivers were not permanent so the map needs to represent the different landmarks in and out of the rainy season. Climate change and conflict are inextricably linked, not only for these reasons but also through fighting for control of the oil fields in the area, oil fields that extract the fossil fuels that are the reason for the climate collapse in the first place.

William, Layla and Mustafa’s stories are also tenderly told, with a gentle romance developing between William and Layla, despite the difficulties of coming from different communities, Nilot and nomad. At the start of the book things are relatively peaceful but in the second half fighting picks up again and the area becomes increasingly unsafe. Ultimately (as you might have guessed from the neat selection of main characters) I felt that the book played things out in a way that was a bit too obvious and lacked some of the nuance and complexity of the first half. The ending is brutally sad and left me feeling a bit hollow.

This was a deliciously twisty tale that pried open the underbelly of Idaban and Lagos, perfectly treading that fine line between serious critique and dark humour. Underneath the guise of a fast paced thriller Olófintúádé shows the extreme homophobia faced by queer people in Nigeria, and the insidious nature of patriarchal family structures that traps women in all sorts of terrible situations.

Steeped in Yoruba culture, the unfolding drama is watched over by the ever present órísà who almost never answer the human’s prayers but sit and spectate from the sidelines helping themselves to a glass of schnapps as they laugh at human folly. The chapter headings nod to TV drama series as does the breakneck plot, building to a very satisfying end.

I loved the three women at the centre of the book and in some ways would have liked to have spent a bit more time getting to understand their thoughts and motivations a bit more, but that would have made it quite a different book. It takes a lot of skill to get the balance right in a book like this and ultimately I think Olófintúádé nailed it.

The End of August begins and ends with script-like sections that describe a funeral gut (ritual) where the voices of Yu Miri’s ancestors speak through the mudangs leading the gut to offer to her the threads of the story we are about to hear. The spirits of these ancestors are restless, having left this world in troubled ways - Yu Miri’s grandfather Lee Woo-Cheol lived through the Japanese occupation of Korea, the Second World War, and the Korean War eventually fleeing to Japan where Yu Miri has lived all her life. 

Yu Miri is herself a character in this book based on her family’s history and in another kind of divining ritual she takes up long distance running in order to connect with Lee Woo-cheol. Like many families that have undergone extreme trauma the actual facts of what happened in the past are buried along with the dead, those affected refusing to speak about what happened. The only way Yu Miri can attempt to understand the repercussions of trauma that the younger generations are left to deal with is writing (and running) through this.

The running sections are punctuated throughout out by a repeated ‘in-hale ex-hale’, the rhythm of breathing, pacing the way the thoughts tumble out in this semi-meditative state. This type of passage repeats at the start and end of the book along with the gut, and it also appears frequently as a way of letting us into Lee Woo-cheol and his brother Lee Woo-gun’s inner thoughts. Running is both a way to connect and a way to escape.

It’s not just the sound of breathing that punctuates the book, Yu Miri’s writing is rich with all sorts of onomatopoeic and mimetic words that describe the sounds of Miryang, it’s river, insects, plant life and weather. A sense of place is conveyed so effectively and helps us get a sense of how tied to Miryang many of the characters are and what that means for their sense of identity while living under Japanese occupation. The book is long but zooms in and out of details, sometimes moving forward at a rapid pace then settling for a while with one character.

The frequent use of Korean language throughout is also really important for this and Morgan Giles has done a really excellent job of translating this book ensuring that we are immersed in the feel of the Korean language and the mimetic words, leaving them untranslated as in the original. Obviously there is additional resonance I would guess in the original Japanese, written as it is in the language of the coloniser. This book is an incredible piece of writing and I am endlessly grateful to Morgan Giles’s commitment to translating this one for an English speaking audience, it was so amazing to hear both Morgan Giles and Yu Miri speak about this book in Manchester last year and hear about the writing process and Giles’s passion for this story. So thankful I got to read this one! So much more I could say about this but I’ll leave it there, hugely recommend it. (Please check the content warnings if you need to - obviously there is a lot of very traumatic stuff covered.)